Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a leading advocate for peace, today offered a broad critique of the National Defense Authorization Act which continues disastrous policies in Libya, and allows for permanent, global war and reauthorizes harmful provisions of the Patriot Act:

“I am offering an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill which would defund the war in Libya.

“The war is unconstitutional. The President did not come to this Congress, he went to the U.N. Security Council, he went to a number of international bodies, but he didn’t come to the United States Congress. Last week, the President did not observe the tolling of the War Powers Act, so he’s in violation of the statute.

“The action over in Libya has already exceeded the U.N. mandate; it’s in violation of the U.N. mandate and there have been violations of international law.

“What are we doing there? Why does anyone think we can afford it? Why aren’t we trying to find a path to peace so we aren’t called upon to spend more money there? These are questions we have to be asking; that’s why Congress needs to say we’re not going to spend more money there.

“People are saying it’s not the United States, it’s NATO. The Guardian in the U.K. did a study which showed that 90% of the cruise missiles are paid for by the U.S. Sixty-six percent of the personnel working against Libya are from the U.S., 50% of aircraft, 50% of all ships – and our government is saying this is a NATO operation? We have to recognize what’s going on here, which is an expansion of the war power by the Executive and it’s time we challenge that. …
continue reading at Rep. Dennis Kucinich

…For decades, at least since Brown vs. Board of Education, advocates inside and outside of government have fiercely debated ways to get everyone a fair shot at learning. They’ve fought over integration, busing, funding, parental choices in schools and, of course, teachers’ unions. Meanwhile, inequities have persisted. Almost 40 percent of black and Latino students don’t graduate high school on time, according to White House figures, compared to a quarter of students overall. According to the latest numbers from the National Assessment for Educational Purposes, only 12 percent of black eighth graders are proficient in reading, where 44 percent of white males are considered proficient.

So now a new perspective has risen above the din, pushed by the Obama administration and heavily influenced by celebrity do-gooders, often from the private sector. In a word, it is simplicity. The existing school systems are rotten from decades of political and bureaucratic warring, these reformers assert, and the solutions are clear. We needn’t concern ourselves with overwhelming, unwieldy discussions about race and poverty. Only one thing need matter: Results. And to get them, we need to hold someone accountable: Educators.

…It turns out that there are enormous structural factors at work in kids’ lives that supersede teacher accountability. Whether it’s protracted parental unemployment, sudden homelessness or expensive family illness, many students are facing daunting barriers to learning that the current education debate has ignored, and that the heroics of even city’s best teachers cannot overcome.

Learning to Get By

Across the country, families that were just holding on before the recession are struggling in brand new ways today. The number of those who are out of work or underemployed refuses to budge, and that has in turn created a separate set of housing woes. As much as parents try to shield their children from these stresses, they show up in the classroom, say educators and economists.

In 2009 economists at the University of California, Davis, found that a parent’s unplanned unemployment increased the likelihood that their child would have to repeat a grade by 17 percent. And long before that, a 1998 study published by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that just one unplanned move for students between the eighth and twelfth grades can cause so much upheaval that it increases the likelihood they’ll drop out of high school by 50 percent….

Meanwhile, school reform has hit primetime in America. Last September, the film* “Waiting for Superman” helped usher the movement into American living rooms, cementing the celebrity status of crusading reformers like former Washington, D.C., schools chief Michelle Rhee. In September 2010, during a two-day education-themed extravaganza, Oprah Winfrey introduced Rhee and the film to America by posing a grave question to her audience: “So who’s most at fault for failing schools and for failing our children?” After a heavy pause, Winfrey explained, “Michelle Rhee says that she knows, and she has taken a very controversial stand.”

Namely, fire the teachers. As Rhee has repeated often, if we could fire the “bottom five to ten percent” of the nation’s educators, inequities would disappear and achievement would soar.

Rhee’s not alone in promoting that idea, and Jose’s hometown has become a hot spot for the battles that have ensued. In April, the Los Angeles Unified School District stepped into the fray by adopting a measurement called Academic Growth Over Time, or “value added” scoring, that links teachers’ job security with their students’ test scores. The move was spurred in part by the Los Angeles Times, which shocked the education world last year when it published a list of 6,000 third, fourth and fifth grade teachers’ names alongside the paper’s own calculations of their individual value-added scores. Since then other cities, and newspapers, have attempted to do similar things.

The Obama administration has both embraced and fueled these trends. Education Secretary Arne Duncan endorsed the Los Angeles Times’ decision to publicize teachers’ scores, saying, “What’s there to hide?”

In 2009, President Obama created Race to the Top, a $4.35 billion competitive state grants program that doles out money to states that adopt the president’s reform agenda. Under the program, struggling schools that do not post adequate progress face one of four overhaul options. In one of the most drastic, a school’s entire staff must be fired and asked to reapply. No more than half may be rehired. Thirty-nine states have responded to Race to the Top by overhauling their education laws. Eleven of them adopted laws that will make standardized test scores part of teacher evaluations.

President Obama called this all part of his plan for “winning the future” in his State of the Union address. He called on parents to do their part at home and for a greater focus on teacher performance, because “after parents, the biggest impact on a child’s success comes from the man or woman at the front of the classroom.”…
read the full article at AlterNet

Germany’s success indicates that one way to fight unemployment would be some modest efforts to give U.S. employers incentives to cut hours, not workers.

The Great Recession hit harder in the United States than in most of the rest of the world. Among the world’s rich economies, we experienced the third largest increase in unemployment, trailing only Spain and Ireland. Most advanced economies saw substantially smaller increases in unemployment and one –Germany– actually saw its unemployment rate decline.

Can we learn anything from countries that weathered the Great Recession better than we did? … Germany’s economy has been up and down since unification in the early 1990s, but points one way out of our mess.

…Unemployment in Germany is lower now than it was before the downturn….

Germany has done well because its labor-market institutions encourage employers to cut hours not workers. Instead of laying off 20 percent of workers, say, a firm can instead lower the average hours of its employees by 20 percent. Both accomplish the same goal, but from a social point of view, cutting hours is much better because it shares the pain more equally and keeps workers tied to their jobs….

HARRISBURG — Pressure is building on state lawmakers to consider changes to the size of the Pennsylvania General Assembly after a Democrat joined a trio of Republicans in officially introducing legislation to reduce the number of legislators in the state.

State Sen. Judy Schwank, D-Berks, announced legislation to cut 83 seats from the state House and 10 seats from the state Senate, resulting in 121 state House districts and 40 state Senate districts.

The state House now has 203 members and the state Senate has 50.

The newest proposal would reduce the ratio of Senate members to House members from 4-to-1 to 3-to-1. It also would give each member of the General Assembly a larger district, both in terms of geography and population.

Each House district now includes about 62,000 residents, while Senate districts include about 250,000 residents. Under Schwank’s proposal, there would be 104,000 residents in each House district and 315,000 in each senatorial district.

Schwank said modern technology made it acceptable to have larger districts….

Equality Fraternity Reality

Strong children

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken ones" —Frederick Douglass

Ignorance and Power

“Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” -- James Baldwin

Money is power….

"Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.”
— Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States 1877-1881

Let the people think….

Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.”
-- William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693

Taxes & budgets

Women's rights

Dehumanization

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human" - Aldous Huxley

Money is power

Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.”
-- Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States (1877-1881)

Riots

“Riots are the language of the unheard” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cost of War

Currently nearing $1.6 trillion, for Iraq and Afghanistan alone; watch it grow at Cost of War

The cause of war

"The cause of war is the preparation of war." -- W.E.B. DuBois

Presidential limits

"The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

--Barack Obama, 2007

Totalitarianism

“To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”

-- George Orwell

Reimagining capitalism

"Politicians argue over big government so they can avoid talking about big capitalism" -- William Greider in The Nation

The problem with democracy

Progressive calendar

Click hereto view calendar of progressive events in and near Chester County.Agenda view (click in upper right of calendar) may be best.

Links to other sites:

Let the people think …

"Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed."
--William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693

On humor

"When oppressed peoples have no other remedy they resort to humor" --E. O. Wilson

Koch Brothers index

For a list of all posts relevant to the Koch Brothers on this site, click here.

Truth and consequences

"If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out." -- Oscar Wilde

Power

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

-- Frederick Douglass, 1817-95

Schools, parents, democracy

“What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” -- John Dewey

Search

Liberty v. power

“The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.”
-- William Hazlitt, 1778-1830

On war

"No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic." - A. J. P. Taylor

Bill Moyers says

"The opposite of poverty is not wealth; it is justice."

Ain’t they got no shame

In the name of peace
They waged the wars
Ain't they got no shame

-- Nikki Giovanni

Need & Greed

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not for every man's greed" -- Gandhi

Normalcy?

"If this is normalcy, I'd hate to see what real trouble is" - the late Daniel Shore on Iraq, Morning Edition, NPR, 3/29/08

Freedom and tyranny

"...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom,
those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." --Voltaire, 1764

Thoughts on War

"Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac." -- George Orwell

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." -- Leon Trotsky

Total Cost of War

The cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to Pennsylvanians alone is over $57,000,000,000 and to the entire US is over $1.3 trillion; now wouldn't that be helpful in Harrisburg and DC these days? Track our dollars' alarming and destructive disappearance at CostofWar.com

The American oligarchy

“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.” — Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not